Janet Brown
Saturday, May 15, 2003

“Germ” is actually the first of a five-book assault that the prolific author calls his “worst case scenario series.” “Nuke,” “Spore,” “End Times,” and “Mind Game” are the other forthcoming titles, each of which, Eberhart says, takes the already troubling contemporary state of affairs and extrapolates it to the brink of its most bitter conclusion for the family of man.

“Nuke, for instance,” Eberhart tells NewsMax, “recounts the story of the ultimate dirty-nuke terror attack on America that poisons the heartland -- but cannot poison the stout hearts of the stalwart citizens of the home of the brave. Same idea with ‘Germ’: take it to the brink but let good and the good guys prevail in the end.”

And that’s exactly what the author does in “Apocalypse Germ,” this premier worst-case scenario.

“Germ” takes place in the first quarter of the present century. It is a strange and troubling time when nuclear deterrence has quietly given way to competing arsenals of silent viral “vector-weapons” that have a ground-zero deep inside an enemy’s DNA.

A “vector” is a genetically engineered virus, which weasels its way into the heart of human cells and plays havoc with the complex arrangement of genes. An outlaw “Manhattan Project” designs the atomic bomb of vector-weapons.

Gone From the Lab!

But something goes horribly wrong, and the ultimate WMD is loose from the lab. Two agents race to the barren desert center of Australia to discover why only a humble band of aborigines seems immune.

Along the way to the bottom of the world, the reader is taken on a roller-coaster ride of adventure and discovery of one clue after another – each leading to a conclusion that could not be guessed.

In one scene, the agents have finally penetrated a great dome filled with what they think is the hardware and personnel that have produced the ultimate vector weapon, but the entrance hall is enigmatically dominated by the towering skeleton of a long-extinct dinosaur:

“The menacing monstrosity faced them with its powerful jaws agape, reaching out with its small clawed arms. Even from the distance, Jeb could see the near perfection of the thing. Unlike the displays he had seen in museums around the world, this T-Rex was no patchwork of genuine fossil and fill-in plaster. It had the look of a holiday turkey carcass freshly plucked from a soup vat.”

So what’s a dinosaur have to do with bringing on Apocalypse to an enemy?

If you guessed that dinosaurs became extinct and maybe the crafty weapons scientists figured out the real how and why and harnessed it, you’d only be part way to the startling final revelations of “Germ.”

As the author puts it in the first-person prologue:

“That’s as much as my ghostwriter will let me tell you about the particulars of my story…

“I composed this introduction while squinting alternately at my laptop’s screen and the restless blue waters of the Coral Sea. Behind where I sit with my toes buried in the warm sand, a magnificent tropical rainforest looms darkly. Its green wall crowds my narrow white ribbon of beach in the coastal lowlands of far-north Australia.

“If life is, as they say, a beach, I guess you could say that I have found mine. I fervently hope that when you read the pages that follow, you will have also found your beach and your peace. If you have, then perhaps we are all safe.

“Safe at last.”

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Bioterrorism

Editor's note:
World’s leading bio-weapons experts warns of smallpox catastrophe – Click here now